Newsfeeds: Read your articles more carefully!
I have a little gizmo that shows me the top three stories from CNN.com at any given time*. The top story is always accompanied by either the story's first paragraph or an abstract thereof. But today, it was obvious that the person writing the abstract was a little ... abstracted.
From the actual article:
India suffered its second huge, crippling power failure in two days Tuesday, depriving as much as half of the vast country, or up to 600 million people, of electricity....
From the abstract:
India has been hit with a huge, crippling power failure, leaving half the nation's 600 million people without power.
While I'm sure that the person writing that abstract was probably an underpaid intern working on too little sleep, it still doesn't take a genius to see the grievous arithmetic error!
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*I have similar gizmos for other news services, like Scientific American, Google News, Reuters, BBC, Time Health and Science, etc. Oh, and (of course) Fark.com! :)
From the actual article:
India suffered its second huge, crippling power failure in two days Tuesday, depriving as much as half of the vast country, or up to 600 million people, of electricity....
From the abstract:
India has been hit with a huge, crippling power failure, leaving half the nation's 600 million people without power.
While I'm sure that the person writing that abstract was probably an underpaid intern working on too little sleep, it still doesn't take a genius to see the grievous arithmetic error!
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*I have similar gizmos for other news services, like Scientific American, Google News, Reuters, BBC, Time Health and Science, etc. Oh, and (of course) Fark.com! :)